>People in Russia and China have almost 30 percentage points more tertiary education levels than Americans do. Nonetheless social media is even more pervasive and popular in China than anywhere else in the world. Like with the panic about video game fixation, harmful time wasters are almost certainly an effect, not a cause, of something else.

I don't know about Russia but China social media is no where close to American Social Media. There is generally time limits, content restrictions and other things that make the two not similar.

When people go "Social media is a problem", they are generally referring to western social media where it's profitability over any external harm they are doing.